The whiplash-inducing white-guilt dramaturgy currently captivating America, which segued from national protests for police reform into an all-encompassing referendum on literally everything racist, reached a crescendo on the afternoon of Friday, June 19.
I was off that day, because the company I work for made it a holiday. Because it happens to be the day, 155 years ago, that Union Army General Gordon Granger declared that all enslaved Black people in Texas were now free too.
Since then, Juneteenth has shifted from a day Black Texans spent BBQing and storytelling to a day that some Black Americans celebrate, some of us acknowledge, and some of us don’t even know exists. The latter is a damning indictment of the American educational system. If the schools I attended were my only resource for learning about slavery, I would’ve thought that Abraham Lincoln personally went block to block, like an Amazon truck, to deliver freedom–and I went to “good” schools.
But in 2020, Juneteenth became another way for America to signal that it’s finally really, really, really serious about this racism thing. Brands released statements. Businesses declared holidays. Taylor Swift retweeted the Root. Some of my friends even shared that they received random funds, through Venmo and Cash App, from white people they happen to know. And then, at 2:52 p.m. E.T., the Americanization of this complex and emotional day reached a peak. This is when Snapchat, through its official Twitter account, tweeted an apology for the Juneteenth Lens–a filter where it asked users to smile to break a chain superimposed behind the user’s head. At this rate, by the time you read this, Juneteenth might have already grown sentient and replaced Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee for President.
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